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Bored of It

paulrobertlloyd.com

481–490 of 507 posts

Re: Bored of It

#481
post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's never going to happen... when has that ever happened?

When most labor is automated, population will not have a source of income. That's the only way that I see.

When auto manufacturing jobs got shifted overseas leaving hundreds of thousands of people without a source of income did the government come in and provide for them? No, of course not.

Re: Bored of It

#482
post #196
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On that specific quote - I feel like this is offensive on more than one level. The waste of our best minds... sure. Fine. But - "to sell you ads." Marketting has the dubious distinction of being one area of human endeavor where technological advances serve mostly to make your life worse, make your mind less focused, make your wallet more empty. The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect marketing campaign/tacti…

> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect marketing campaign/tactic literally hypnotizes you into dropping all your money on an arbitrary good or service. It is isomorphic to somebody mugging you. I like the quote and despise advertising of any kind for mostly the same reason, but you could apply this logic to any kind of business and it starts to fall apart. > The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfec…

Without ads there's no craving to be filled. Without food I still die of hunger. Without pharmaceuticals I still die of sickness.

Re: Bored of It

#483
post #17

> The best minds of my generation I’m tired of that line. I remember first seeing it on “the best minds of our generation being employed to sell you ads”. Making a computer go brrr doesn’t qualify anyone for a “best mind”. I’d hope a “best mind” would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans. Philosophical about the state of the world. Patient. Curious. Wise and not just smart.…

The point of that quote is not at all that those minds are so smart, but rather that their industry is sad and detrimental.

That is: to fan the fire that is burning the world so that a select few can get more comfortable.

I'm not talking about a flyer here or a store face there, but there is definitely a point where ads don't benefit us anymore. Can I buy the sky and project ads on it? Can I buy the ocean and project ads on it?

Re: Bored of It

#485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we'll have to find another way You agree it is a problem, then. What are some solutions you can think of? I'm not convinced the gain is worth the pain, but maybe you have some ideas for me to think about.

I really don't know, unfortunately. It seems important that we go beyond merely maintaining people in a state of being not dead, and enable them to feel young as well. This may cure a certain entrenched resentfulness. It will not, however, prevent people from being asshats or provide a mechanism by which they will eventually go away. Perhaps the concept of limited terms in power would be made more general to fields o…

Yeah I don't know either. Thanks to modern medicine, we already have enormous and growing problems with the accumulation of power and wealth in individuals. Currently, death is the only (legal/ethical) check we have on the people who have accumulated so much power that they are above the law. If we remove natural death, how can we ever get out from under the thumb of the uber-powerful? I'd really like to see more thought put into solving these problems before I could be convinced that longevity research is ethical.

Re: Bored of It

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's hope solving aging is beyond the grasp of even the smartest AI. No surer way to end up in a world full of calcified ideas than having lot of calcified humans clinging to power and enforcing their ways on younger generations. Not to mention the environmental impact of everlasting humans.

You don't have to participate, even if it gets solved. Feel free to die out. The idea is that people can't take new ideas in as they age makes zero sense to me.

> The idea is that people can't take new ideas in as they age makes zero sense to me.

Hmm. My counter to this would be that I agree it isn't impossible, but would take such an enormous amount of voluntary effort that no one would spend it to completely update their information about the world.

To give a non-controversial example, take dinosaurs. Almost everyone who grew up before about the year 2000 thinks of dinosaurs as big, scaly lizards, myself included. That's what we were taught, that's what all of our culture showed us, that's what our museums contained. It was the pervasive view for well over a hundred years before we were even born. But now we know that many of them had feathers! This is an uncontroversial fact, but almost everyone currently over the age of 30 is wrong about it, and everyone under the age of 30 has the (currently believed to be) correct view!

Now think about how many other facts we were taught 30+ years ago. Which do we now know are wrong? What cultural beliefs did we learn growing up, that are now outdated and believed to be harmful? What systems do we need to have to update those beliefs? Given current evidence, will those systems actually work? Relearning information and modifying your lifelong habits is really, really hard compared to children learning new information. I don't think the vast majority of people would put in the effort. I think science and culture would stagnate. Death is the process by which we give power to younger people, who have better information to work with than we did. Death is how we make cultural and scientific progress.

While this is something I feel strongly about, I also understand your point of view. I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but I think the folks working in longevity fields really need to think about and address these problems before they open Pandora's Box and eliminate natural death. I'm not convinced their work is good for humanity.

Re: Bored of It

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't know, unfortunately. It seems important that we go beyond merely maintaining people in a state of being not dead, and enable them to feel young as well. This may cure a certain entrenched resentfulness. It will not, however, prevent people from being asshats or provide a mechanism by which they will eventually go away. Perhaps the concept of limited terms in power would be made more general to fields o…

Yeah I don't know either. Thanks to modern medicine, we already have enormous and growing problems with the accumulation of power and wealth in individuals. Currently, death is the only (legal/ethical) check we have on the people who have accumulated so much power that they are above the law. If we remove natural death, how can we ever get out from under the thumb of the uber-powerful? I'd really like to see more tho…

It's only ethical because we have no power to prevent their death. If research could be done that looked likely to extend lives, but we chose not to because we'd rather people die earlier, that's equivalent to stealthily killing them. We might as well be upfront about it, and have them slain for being too old, except then they'd tend to resist.

Re: Bored of It

#488
post #69
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On that specific quote - I feel like this is offensive on more than one level. The waste of our best minds... sure. Fine. But - "to sell you ads." Marketting has the dubious distinction of being one area of human endeavor where technological advances serve mostly to make your life worse, make your mind less focused, make your wallet more empty. The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect marketing campaign/tacti…

0. I want third-party advertising eliminated entirely and self-sdvertising advertising on one's own property more regulated than it currently is.

Be careful what you wish for. At least at the moment it is easy to use tools like uBlock to avoid ads but it gets more difficult if they are served as an integral part of the page from the same domain.

Re: Bored of It

#489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the greatest tool in human history in your opinion? I think it's too early to call whether AI is the answer to that question, but I think it could be. Yes, LLMs are terrible in all kinds of ways, but there's clearly something there that's of great value. I use it all day every day as a staff-level engineer, and it's making me much better and faster. I can see glimmers of intelligence there, and if we're on a…

> What is the greatest tool in human history in your opinion? Language, fire, writing; in that order.

Even AI mostly agrees with you! ChatGPT suggests:

Language, Writing, and the Scientific Method.

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